The blog of Steve Root

  • Rotary and Rootary

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    I’m sure there’s a better pun on the name Root and the organisation called Rotary, for now I just can’t think of one. Go on, post a comment and be applauded by the other visitor for your ingenuity.

    This very overdue post follows an email from a past customer way back in February, inviting me to join a Rotary club. What’s a Rotary club? I didn’t know before I went along. Jarle’s invitation managed to get me along so let’s begin with that:

    Hi Steve,

    Long time, no speak. I trust you are keeping well. I am to be the founder President of the Rotary Club of Canterbury Sunrise and have been thinking of who might be interested in joining us. Knowing the sort of person you are, I wondered if you might be interested. Please find below a little bit about us.

    For nearly 6 months, a number of like-minded people have been meeting every Wednesday at 0715, in the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral, to establish a new Rotary Club in Canterbury – The Sunrise Club.

    Rotary is a service organisation of business and professional leaders united world-wide who help those in need, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations and work towards world understanding and peace. Rotarians meet weekly to enjoy each others’ fellowship and discuss ways to serve others.

    Working full time and trying to fit in social commitments is often difficult, but our hour long meetings at the International Study Centre, in the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral, minimises the intrusion into normal working hours.

    If you would like to widen your circle of friends whilst giving something back to the community, please come along to one of our meetings. We meet every Wednesday morning at 7.15am for breakfast (8). Hopefully, you will be sufficiently impressed with what you see to want to come along regularly.

    Our current membership numbers just short of twenty and we are confident of attracting several new members. This is your chance to be in at the start of a new and exciting club – we are to inaugurate as an official Rotary Club on 23rd April 2008!

    Rotary is approximately 1.2 million service-minded men and women belonging to more than 32,400 Rotary Clubs in virtually every country of the world. Membership is by invitation.

    Hope to hear from you.

    Kind regards,

    Jarle Tatt.

    So, what else could I do but go along. I later discovered my reply was fairly typical:

    Hello Jarle,

    Good to hear from you – I’m honoured you remembered me!

    I’ve heard of Rotary for years, seen the “Rotary meets here” signs in lots of places, but have never taken the time to find out more about it. I guess this it perfect time to find out more! I’m visiting a supplier this Wednesday, how about Wednesday 5th March?

    Anything I should know before hand? (Dress code? Best place to park?)

    Regards
    Steve

    Lots and lots of people have heard of Rotary but only by name, having no idea what the organisation does or why.

    If 7.15am sounds an early start – it is! At least for me. A few years ago I was a member of an organisation called BNI. The BNI group I was in set a meeting start time of 6.45 but I was typically there by 6.15. BNI is a group that focuses on business referrals. I started that in 1998 as a new person in business and finished about 2 years ago. I gained a lot from BNI, improving my presentation skills (because I’m proud of it, I’ll add here that I got an award from BNI founder Ivan Misner for a 60 second presentation when he visited our chapter’s meeting in Rochester), developing new contacts (especially when I started a chapter in Faversham) and making lots of friends in business who I still talk with regularly. The reason I left BNI after 8 years was to reduce my working hours and avoid the early starts. BNI brought business into Roots but also took at least a day of my time a week in order to do so. I wanted to move from a 6 or 7 day week into a 5 day week. Stopping BNI was one way of achieving that.

    So, 7.15 is early but BNI was earlier so it didn’t seem so bad. That still leaves the question of why go? Jarle’s email said “Rotary is a service organisation of business and professional leaders united world-wide who help those in need, encourage high ethical standards in all vocations and work towards world understanding and peace. Rotarians meet weekly to enjoy each others’ fellowship and discuss ways to serve others.”. That’s very wordy but as it turns out, a very accurate way to summarise what Rotary is. There’s a little more to it and there are other ways of phrasing it but unlike BNI this is a group where the aim is not generating business.

    The summary of all of this is I went along to a Rotary meeting, and I haven’t missed one since. Why? What happened? I’ll continue on the next post.

  • Halting State (Charles Stross)

    First things first, I love the cover of this book. It’s got pixelated drawings of people like you’d find in games on Atari ST and Amiga’s in the early 90’s. Brings back fun memories.

    Anyway, onto the story, it all begins with a robbery from within an online game. We follow a policewoman as she works with a game programmer to understand what’s happened and why it really means anything. It means a lot when people start getting killed over it. The story twists and turns and reveals an innovative vision of the future. Scotland is an independent country, though it shares some of it’s police computer system with England still. Online gamers play games in the real world unwittingly doing tasks for the government and children still go to school. That last bit is to let you know that as outlandish and creative as some Charles Stross books have been, this one is set in a believable near future. A great read, Rootie Rating 5 out of 5

  • Out of the Silent Planet (C S Lewis)

    Growing up, I read all of the Narnia books. I’d persuaded my parents to buy me the full set of 7 as a 12 year old and read from the first to the last. I loved those books. I already knew of the “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” but until I got the set I didn’t know that was the 2nd in the series. I remember the set taking up a huge space on my bedroom bookshelf. I also remember thinking of the author C S Lewis as someone who lived in the 1800’s. How wrong could I be. In the local second hand bookshop I found 3 books, all by C S Lewis, all in the Sci Fi section. I had to pick them up. Reading the cover of one, I found that CS Lewis only died in 1963 and wrote many other stories.

    Onto this story, Out of the Silent Planet is about a man who is taken to a different planet in our solar system. There he meets intelligent beings and discovers lots of things. OK, that’s probably the worst review I’ve written in a long time (not that I’m assuming any have been any good!). The trouble is, this is a really good book that is really worth reading, and if I give away any little part it has a good chance of spoiling the story. I can tell you one thing though, I really like the way the whole aspect of launching a spaceship from Earth was neatly sidestepped. All the physics, all the pages of description there could have been, all made redundant by having our central character unconscious for the time of launch. Rootie Rating 5 out of 5.

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